Google Go Reaches 1.0 Status

A few years back Google announced that they were creating a new programming language which they felt emphasised their core principles of simplicity and speed.

Now the developers behind go finally feel that Go is ready to be solidified as a v1 product that people can rely on. Like any programming language, the goal isn’t just to create a compiler or interpreter, but to have a fixed language specification that people can rely on. This way a program written today can be sure to run a decade from now.

Go 1 brings a number of improvements to the language, the standard library (which has been reorganized and includes new packages), and the tool suite has been restructured as well. In fact another feature that should speed up development is a new “go” command that can derive build instructions from the source code itself, thus eliminating the need for Makefiles.

Recently Google also started offering Google Go as an option on Google App Engine, their cloud computing service. Google App Engine and its SDK too have been updated to use the latest version of Go. Other options provided by Google App Engine are Java and Python (2.5 or 2.7).

Google Go is also part of the GCC since version 4.6 — the current version is 4.7 — and now that there is an official release of the language, binary distributions for Linux, Windows and Mac OSX are available. Earlier it was only available in source form.

You can find out more about Google Go, and download it for your platform from the Google Go website.